David Fraga Aydillohttp://davidfraga.es
Tue, 18 Oct 2011 08:53:30 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.4.2DavidFragaAydillohttps://feedburner.google.comBooks are awesome!http://davidfraga.es/2011/books-are-awesome/270
http://davidfraga.es/2011/books-are-awesome/270#commentsFri, 27 May 2011 17:09:15 +0000dfragahttp://davidfraga.es/?p=270I can’t say anything else!!
]]>http://davidfraga.es/2011/books-are-awesome/270/feed26334-Hour-Body contest: 4 hours for the 4-hours guyhttp://davidfraga.es/2010/4-hour-body-contest-4-hours-for-the-4-hours-guy/229
http://davidfraga.es/2010/4-hour-body-contest-4-hours-for-the-4-hours-guy/229#commentsFri, 15 Oct 2010 20:29:11 +0000dfragahttp://davidfraga.es/?p=229You know I’m a big fan of Tim Ferriss, basically because it’s allways great when you find someone who has already achived the goals you are still following
In one of his last posts he proposed a competition related with his last book 4Hour Body (to be release in December): the “best” banner design will win some fantastic prizes!!
You can find the details here: 4Hour-Body banner design competition.
I’m deeply involved in advertising world because one of my companies works in this market, so I couldn’t help taking part of it!

So, here you have all the process explained from the very beginning to the final conclusions.

The Goal
The goal is quite simple: create an ad, test it and improve its efficiency, post it in the TimFerriss Facebook fan page, andq finally be selected by him so he can test if it really works better than the other selected ads.

Methodology
We only can work directly in the two first steps of the competition: create an ad and test and improve it. So the process we’re going to follow is based on that. But indirectly we can try to find something that Tim Ferriss really like, so he might tend to choose my ad…we’ll try to combine these two ideas.

…to beging with the second one, this post we’ll be written in the same way he does

First of all we have to create an outstanding ad!! people should click on it as soon as they see it and after that they should buy the book. This isn’t easy but there are a lot of advertising techniques we can use here to be closer to our goal.

Lately I’ve been ready a book that have to do with accesibility and web desing: Don’t make me think!. As you can imagine, the main idea is simple: don’t make your audience think too much!

I’ll try to achieve it with my ads: people won’t have to think whether of clicking on the ad or not, because the only “answer” will be to do it.

To get that I found out a powerful combination of ideas: to combine simplicity and fun. I think if I mix both I’ll be close of achieving The Goal.

After almost two hours of brainstorming, narrowing down options, improving ideas and fighting against my Corel PHOTO-Paint 9, the result was this: three basic ads that show different physical goals combined with “funny motivators”…there are lots of ways to achive what you want…but some of them are easier thant others
…and of course, you don’t have to think to know the answer!!

Making money with Amazon Affiliate Program(register + set up + link generation: 15m)
Tim suggested to us that we should sign up in the Amazon Affiliate Program so we can measure the effectiveness of our ads…and make money, of course. So that’s what I did. Here you have an outline of this simple process:

The Amazon Affiliate Program is a CPA-based affiliating program (as most of these programs are). It allows you to generate links, banners, widgets and even a complete store to sell Amazon products. If someone ends up buying a products because of these links, you make money.
To get the money there are several options, but I can’t use the direct deposit because I’m not in the US. So we have to choose the “check” payment method. They charge $15 per check, but anyway we were lucky: they don’t charge people from outside US.“If your billing address is outside the United States, and direct deposit is, therefore, unavailable to you, we will waive the $15 fee.”

If you use affiliate programs as I do, you’ll really like its “Link checker!”. It checks if the links you generated work well, so you will sleep like a baby knowing that you didn’t make any mistake getting the links and they are making money for you.

Only one more thing…I can’t believe it but I think they don’t allow you to use custom parameters in the links!!

Getting better (testing and testing)(campaign set up: 10min., deployment: 5min, testing: 24 hours)
Now it’s time to test the ads in the real world. There are several options to do that. For example you can deploy an AdWords campaing, but I decide to do it all by my own. Why? because it’s more fun for me (and, of course, because I can do it!! ).

My weapons:
- Advertising inventory available: I have a blog network with more than 125 websites and a traffic of about 10.000.000 page views per month, so I can place the ads in my own websites and show them maaaaaaaaany times.
- Fast deployment: I can deploy the campaign in just few minutes with our ad-server (a in-housed OpenX instalation).
- Tracking tools: I have a complete tracking system call “e-promotion.net”. Now it’s in beta but it works fine. I can know every single detail about my ads: impressions, clicks, referer sites, etc. So it’s perfect for these tests.

But…nothing’s perfect:
- Spanish speaker audience: I have some english-speaker websites, but most of them are for spanish people. This is a kind of disadventage for me, but I’ll deal with that.
- Non professional/high-profile audience.
- I don’t have too much time to test the ads.
- The “CPA problem”: I can easily know what’s going to be the CTR of every banner, but I can’t know wich banners have a higher CPA because the Amazon Affiliate Program don’t allow you to custom your links

Some of these problems might be overcome with an AdWords Campaign, but as I said before, this is cheaper for me and, most of all, I like this way more!

…is it going to be useful?
We are going to get a significant amount of samples and acurate data, so our conclusions will have a good fundation. Anyway we’ll do basically a comparative analysis and we’ll apply some “Fixing factors” so we’ll be able to compare spanish and english effectiveness.

And most important thing: in this case…everything that counts can be counted. So we’ll take note of the CTR of every add on every website.

After testing the banners for 24 hours we have the first results. Now we’ll try to improve them.

The best CTR ad is the “lose weight” one. It’s CTR is twice better than the “sex” ad and five times better than the “stronger” one.

So, what are the changes going to be? First of all we’ll translate the ads to spanish so we can test if the language it’s important here.

Another “detail” I’d like to test is related to the propose action in the banners. All of them have a “buy” button, but it might be too “direct”, so I’ll create new versions with a different propose action. In this case: “More Info”. May be there are people interested in the book but the react negatively when they see a “buy” there. Anyway, we can’t know it until we test it…

So, here you have the new versions…

Allea jacta est
We won’t have time for more testing. It’s a pity because I really like doing this, but the deadline is almost here.

After two days of testing and improving ads and after almost 4 hours of work (it took me more time than I thought to write this post ), the results are these (using the worst one as reference):

I really like these results!!! They mean that on the one hand english audience is really interested in losing weight but, on the other hand, spanish audience wants to be stronger!! …someone should study this deeply

Beside…sex is not the most important thing for none of them!! It’s hard to believe it, but the figures are there

The other variations had to do with the propose action (“buy” or “more info”). The results are these:
In the english ads, only the “stronger” one improved its CTR (x2). The other two had a lower CTR (<50% than before). In the spanish ads none of the ads improved with the "more info" button. So I think it's not a good idea to change the button.

With all this things in mind the three best ads are, in this order:

english audience wants to lose weight!!!

spanish audience wants to be stronger!!!

it’s not the first but it’s always there: sex!

I hope Tim likes them (and he likes this post too, of course! ).

I’ll keep you posted if I win!!

]]>http://davidfraga.es/2010/4-hour-body-contest-4-hours-for-the-4-hours-guy/229/feed3003Randy Pausch – How to make your dreams come truehttp://davidfraga.es/2010/randy-pausch-how-to-make-your-dreams-come-true/129
http://davidfraga.es/2010/randy-pausch-how-to-make-your-dreams-come-true/129#commentsWed, 08 Sep 2010 23:30:56 +0000dfragahttp://davidfraga.es/?p=129I really love this kind of videos!! It’s great when you find out that there are more people who have the same ideas than you about many aspects of life.

It’s even better when those people teach you invaluable lessons. Lessons that are the result of years of good and bad experiences.

This is one of those videos, and its title couldn’t be more appealing….wouldn’t you like to know how to make your dreams come true?

Hi everybody! from now on I’ll be writing all my posts in english (but those having to do with futbolin issues, of course!).

I think this’s going to be really good for my english writing skills, because I don’t usually do that. Besides, it might be a good way to get more people reading my blog (I know, that’s not difficult at all ).

So, let’s start this new phase. I know this is not as important as what Scopions said in its “Wind of Change”, but it’s a little step more for me…so enjoy this great song!!